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By Root 1519 0

had lost some of its hypnotic force. The number of divorces nationwide had doubled in the ten years since 1952. Thousands of housewives, already identified as “miserable” and “suffering,” were sending rescue notes to magazines, begging advice. Ladies’ Home Journal launched the famed, long-running feature “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963. “Togetherness,” that byword of 1950s normalcy, began to sound ominous. Among the most popular films of 1962 was Days of Wine and Roses, starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as a couple free-falling into mutually supportive alcoholism. The film seems microscopically focused on alcohol abuse, complete with a Twelve Step savior who appears at the end, to explain Important Facts about The Issue. But it may also be seen as a portrait of midcentury marriage as claustrophobic nightmare—“togetherness” as the theme for a monster movie. Here, in a small apartment, live a devoted modern couple who have dutifully excluded their closest relatives. In their isolation, their willingness to get or do anything for each other without question, they slowly poison each other.

By far the most controversial element of an evolving single consciousness was the introduction in 1960 of the Pill. All over the country, college-aged girls, “nice” girls from “fine” schools, began taking it en masse and saying radical things about sex—or so it seemed to a population unaccustomed to this open public discussion. More alarming still, they sounded very blasé about the things they said. These young women “assume that [sex] is a possible and probable part of a single girl’s experience,” wrote young reporter Gloria Steinem in Esquire in 1962. As one graduate student told her, “Lovemaking can be good outside marriage and bad in marriage just as easily as the other way around. Sex is neutral, like money. It’s the way you use it that counts.” One national magazine polled four hundred college students on “chastity.” The findings: Nearly “all respondents…virginal or no more…said…sexual behavior is something you have to decide by yourself.”

Many young college women used their training in logic to support this newly constructed morality. One of Steinem’s subjects had affairs out of marriage because, in her considered view, women were meant for lots of sex. As she reasoned, females were the only mammals capable of orgasm during times they were unable to conceive, therefore orgasm must have served some other purpose, namely pleasure. Another argued: “I’m not preaching against the institution of marriage by having affairs beforehand and I’m not going to produce illegitimate children for society to take care of. People who have no share in the consequences should have no share in the decision.” A companion of hers solemnly concluded, “With one hundred percent birth control you are not running the risk of hurting anyone by your behavior and therefore it is not immoral.” Others were more practical: “If I’d known, I might have postponed my wedding and had pre-marital relations instead.” (One campus student board declared that by 1984 “women will be 100% unchaste.”)

Within two years of its introduction, at least 750,000 American women were on the Pill and an estimated 500 more began taking it every day. The Complete Book of Birth Control, published by the Planned Parenthood Federation, reported on who they were and went on at some length. I quote it briefly: “More education and better income…tend to shift the responsibility for birth control to the wife. Informal studies indicate the same shift among unmarried girls.” Unlike the diaphragm, the Pill could be prescribed for a number of nonsexual causes—menstrual irregularities, control of ovarian cysts—and thus there were convenient excuses for anyone to take it.

Gloria Steinem, starting here to sound like Gloria Steinem, wrote that “the development of a new autonomous girl is important and in numbers quite new…. She expects to find her identity neither totally without mennor totally through them…She has work she wants to do and she can…marry later than